Confession

After a Lifetime of Lies, It’s Time to Face the Truth

I have been avoiding this post, but doing so is taking a physical toll, and I can’t put it off. A small, shivering wave of anxiety comes over me now and again. It lasts only a few minutes, but it leaves me shaken. I tried to convince myself that I might be getting sick. Yes, I had already had the cold-like illness that my grandson was about to get and that his mother was suffering from when Dennis and I were at their house on Monday to help the under-the-weather Isabel with her wonderfully busy five-month-old while his dad was out of town. But still. Maybe a fever and sore throat was right around the corner for me again. I almost wished it were, because then, I wouldn’t have to dig into what the real problem might be. But here we are, so let’s get it over with.

It looks like I have become the person I never liked or respected much: a person who has left the Church. I write, “It looks like” because people will want to lump me in with all those other bitter, foolish, former Catholics. Perhaps they are right in doing so. Everyone who has walked away from the Church has his own reasons. Some might be deemed valid by those who have set themselves up as judges, most probably wouldn’t. In the end, the opinions of those self-appointed judges don’t matter. One’s relationship with God is a personal, individual thing, between one person and God, and as a wise friend once pointed out, God cares about individuals. “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” Satan, on the other hand, cares only about numbers. It doesn’t matter much to Old Scratch who he is tormenting down in hell, only that there are enough of them.

The people here on earth with me, though, are not God. I know that. They care about individuals and numbers, as do the institutions upon which societies are built. What, after all, is a society? It’s a tribe, and chieftains do not like it when numbers begin to fall. It threatens the tribe itself, it threatens the chieftain’s power, it might lead others away, and it has a tendency to raise questions in the hearts of those close to the one walking away: if this isn’t right for her, what if it’s not right for me? In short, it’s always possible that any one dissenter (no matter how seemingly insignificant) might be the stone in the foundation that shakes everything above it. The Story gets threatened. My family and I dealt with the phenomenon in a different context every time we walked into a grocery store without a mask during the Plandemic (has it really even ended, or has it morphed into something else: namely, anything our evil overlords want it to be?). If any other shopper dared to look us in the eyes, they communicated fear and hatred (the two often go hand in hand). Most of the time, they looked away, perhaps chanting to themselves, “It’s okay. It’s okay. Go to your happy place. Stay six feet away from those beasts and you’ll be fine.”

In Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, Oural tells us that she is writing her defense against the gods for what she did to her sister Psyche. My defense is too long and winding to be included in this post. Perhaps I’ll write my own book. For now, I’ll say that my exit from the Catholic Church was a lifetime in the making (no matter how desperately and relentlessly I tried to be the best Catholic the world has ever seen). I’ll share that I do not have many answers, mostly questions; I’ll let you know that I am happy to slowly be building a relationship with God, instead of a relationship with an idea of God that took the form of The Catholic Church; I will assure you that my husband and children are free to follow their own paths in their relationships with God; and I will point you to a couple of posts that I wrote last year, when I started to realize that avoidance of the truth wasn’t working for me anymore. Those posts are Whitewashed Tombs and Maybe I Missed God.